The REAL work of forensics – so not dramatic

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For all you fans of television’s CSI and its ilk who think forensics work is exciting, dramatic or even glamorous, the grubby hunt for clues going on right now at the home of kidnap-rape suspects Phillip Craig Garrido and his wife, Nancy Garrido, near Antioch offers a sobering exhibit to the contrary.

Dozens of investigators from Hayward, Dublin and a clutch of other jurisdictions are literally crawling on their hands and knees all day through sun-blasted dry weeds and debris, picking up the dirt one handful at a time for inspection. Once in a while, a minuscule chunk of plastic or paper or somesuch looks promising, and one of the searchers will call over another so they can pore over it and drop it carefully into a plastic bag. Or in a trash can. Then it’s back to all fours for more scratching in the dust.

Lance Iverson / The Chronicle

Investigators pore through the back yard of the house next to Phillip Craig and Nancy Garrido.

The temperature at the former Garrido compound of ramshackle tents and sheds — where the couple alledly imprisoned Jaycee Dugard and her daughters for years — has been in the upper 80s this week. But if you’re close to the ground on dirt and cement, with the merciless Contra Costa County sun drilling down like a klieg light, it feels more like 100.

There’s no soundtrack to lighten things up. No Laurence Fishburne or Marg Helgenberger to crack wise. No quick ‘n’ easy “gotcha!” moments where the big-deal find solves the crime by dinner.

So far, the teams have found some bones of indeterminate origin. Thursday, two cadaver-sniffing dogs apparently detected the possible odor of human remains, and following up on that will be searchers’ major task Friday.

Those who aren’t crawling in the dirt are using shovels, pitchforks and small tractors to shove through the tons of trash, sheds and jumbled junk the Garridos left in their back yard. By the time they’re done, which won’t be for several days at least, they expect to haul out 15 truckloads of garbage.

Work is a bit quicker and easier at the house next door, where Phillip Garrido once spent time taking care of an elderly man and sleeping in a shed, but that yard has less shade. Making, of course, for a more oven-like experience on all fours.

“It’s some pretty tough work, all right,” said Contra Costa County sheriff’s spokesman Jimmy Lee, looking just a tad relieved that he got to handle the daily media crush in a suit down the street instead of the hands-on stuff in the yards. “And there’s a lot more to be done.”

This hunt-and-peck drill has gone on more intensively in the past couple of days as detectives try to see if there is evidence that the Garridos had anything to do with the disappearances of two girls from Hayward and Dublin in the 1980s. But it really began last month, after the Garridos were arrested and charged with kidnapping Dugard in 1991 in South Lake Tahoe and raping her.

And it probably won’t end after the picking and scratching is over in the yards, and the houses themselves, let alone the sniffing around by cadaver-sensitive dogs and ground-penetrating radar. Investigators want to tear down the Garrido house altogether so they can go through everything underneath it — and with the property condemned as unsafe by county officials, their chances of being able to do that are good.